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PLATFORM OVERVIEW

App-centric Infrastructure Performance Management

OverviewThe VirtualWisdom App-centric Infrastructure Performance Management (App-centric IPM) platform ensures the performance, availability, health, and utilization of enterprise IT infrastructure in service of increasingly complex and demanding business applications. The out-of-band solution intelligently collects machine and wire data across physical and virtual hosts, Ethernet and Fibre Channel fabrics, Software-defined, Converged, as well as SAN and NAS storage. Using cross domain correlation, VirtualWisdom’s App-centric Analytics transform the collected data into actionable insights that can be used to optimize the environment and proactively find and resolve issues before users are affected. This enables IT teams to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives and guarantee performance-based service level agreements (SLAs), enhancing the value of the infrastructure. With new insights, IT teams are taking control of their environment and working collaboratively to drive positive business outcomes.

Business Drivers for VirtualWisdom App-centric IPM

Infrastructure is expensive, costly to maintain, and often difficult to scale. Larger IT organizations are now supporting thousands of application services over a shared infrastructure, with thousands of infrastructure services. While transitioning to virtualized and cloud environments can reduce capital expenditures (CAPEX) on physical hardware, the challenges of visibility into the health, utilization, and performance of this dynamic infrastructure remains a tremendous people-intensive process.

Enterprise IT doesn’t have a uniform basis for understanding how the underlying infrastructure is performing. They are challenged to correlate disparate metrics across a heterogeneous data center that constantly changes. What is needed is a purpose-built solution that adapts and scales to this constant state of change and complexity—one that provides definitive answers to the most complex infrastructure questions in the context of key business-critical applications.

VirtualWisdom seamlessly brings all this disparate data together—correlating and analyzing it in real time—to provide an authoritative understanding of performance, health, and utilization. The actionable insight that VirtualWisdom provides to both infrastructure and application teams—from executive to specialist—enables them to assign performance-based guarantees to their mission-critical applications, regardless of whether they are operating in physical, virtual, or hybrid cloud computing environments.

We’ve seen both the economic and manageability improvements in our environment, and we’ve been able to achieve high utilization and performance…

Josh Morton

VP of IT Enterprise Services

The answers and insights from VirtualWisdom help teams proactively manage and optimize their infrastructures, independent of application, technology, and vendor—increasing efficiencies, mitigating risk of unplanned downtime, and delivering true ROI.

With VirtualWisdom deployed, your revenues are protected from slowdowns and outages. Unnecessary over-provisioning is eliminated, troubleshooting times are reduced by over 80%, and, perhaps most importantly, new application roll-outs to drive new business opportunities are dramatically accelerated.

The Industry’s Premier App-centric IPM PlatformOur award-winning platform is built from the ground up, with a focus on helping your applications and infrastructure perform optimally together.

The powerful analytics database and intuitive user interface (UI) deliver application-aware, entity-centric, real-time visualizations of thousands of metrics across the physical and virtual data center. VirtualWisdom is the industry’s first true infrastructure monitoring solution that delivers comprehensive visibility into your multi-tiered application infrastructure environment— a platform that understands how the infrastructure is performing for all of your critical applications. It knows which application services are running on which infrastructure components, as well as the relative importance of each application and how those applications are stressing the infrastructure.

The Value of App-centricityCompanies have been forced into the role of system integrator as a direct result of perpetually increasing complexity and abstraction in highly multi-vendor data centers. Increasingly, virtualization, cloud-computing, and software-defined are rendering device-based tools obsolete in enterprise IT.

To maximize value from your infrastructure investments, some key tenets should be applied. These include an understanding on where your applications live on the infrastructure, the business value of those applications, and the ability to monitor and manage the performance, utilization and health of the infrastructure services supporting the applications.

With an app-centric approach, you will:

• Proactively assure the performance

of your key applications

• Manage by applications, by service

level tier, and by importance to the

business (i.e., platinum, gold, silver)

• Avoid performance issues by continuously

optimizing capacity to meet the

needs of application workloads

• Resolve problems faster through

platform intelligence that identifies

and recommends solutions

VirtualWisdom App-Centric AnalyticsApp-centric Analytics focus on the critical findings that exist beyond your raw data. The App-centric Analytics module is delivered on a subscription basis, specific to the scope and scale of your unique VirtualWisdom implementation. This licensing model provides customers with all the standard analytics for troubleshooting and diagnostics, capacity management, and application service assurance.

Problem Avoidance and Resolution

Event Advisor - Get a prioritized list of potentially interesting events (spikes, relevant performance issues, anomalous behavior, etc.) that require attention, ranked by magnitude and duration.

Trend Matcher - Accepts a base trend for a target metric, compares it with every device in the database over a specified timeframe then provides a list of matching devices sorted by correlation.

Queue Solver - Recommends the resetting of an execution (or queue depth) throttle on the HBA card(s) of a specified host which enables you to optimize the read or write response time of that host.

Workload and Capacity Optimization

Balance Finder - Checks that the hosts in the environment have functioning path failover by comparing traffic patterns of all the ports associated with a single host to determine whether the multi- pathing software is functioning as intended.

VM Coordinator - Provides optimal placement for VMs across a cluster and recommends reconfiguration to reduce contention for CPU or memory resources.

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VM Deployment Advisor - Identifies the optimal cluster and host to which to deploy a VM based on available capacity and expected VM workload across CPU, memory, I/O, and network.

Workload Analysis - Transfers information from VirtualWisdom to Load DynamiX Enterprise, for building an optimized storage infrastructure.

Storage Port Balancer - Identifies overloaded storage ports and makes HBA/Host move suggestions that would rebalance the front-end ports of a Fibre Channel storage array.

Application Service Assurance

Seasonal Trend - Data informed prediction of resource needs within seasonal business patterns by hour, day, month, quarter or year.

Scalable Instrumentation: A Combination of Wire and Machine Data AcquisitionA monitoring and analytics platform is only as strong as its underlying data sources. The continued abstraction, scale and convergence of these data sources demands tightly integrated products designed to discover, ingest, correlate and export meaningful information, in real time. As these data sources and volumes continue to increase, it is the organizations that can leverage both wire and machine data from the widest variety of sources, correlating and analyzing them to deliver meaningful business analytics, who are getting the most value and insight from their data.

Virtual Instruments has partnered with leading system, switching and storage vendors to address this requirement for business success. By integrating with products from companies such as Cisco, Brocade, Gigamon, ServiceNow, Dell EMC, NetApp, IBM, Microsoft, VMware and many more, VirtualWisdom delivers an analytics platform that makes it easy to bring together data from various sources and apply powerful analytics.

VirtualWisdom IntegrationsVirtual Instruments offers direct technology integration to a variety of infrastructure devices and third-party platforms. From Gigamon and Cisco to ServiceNow, companies share a common vision around the need for an App-centric approach to the management of data center infrastructure. Customers can choose the data sources and integrations that are most relevant to their business goals.

VirtualWisdom’s full-stack line-rate monitoring capabilities help you optimize the infrastructure that supports your most demanding applications. The Probes and integrations below are combined with the best of the Virtual Instruments award winning analytics capabilities to holistically monitor your virtual machines, hosts, network switches, and storage infrastructure.

Virtual Server Family

The ProbeVM Family of software-based probes collect and present hundreds of performance and utilization metrics from the associated physical server and hypervisor estate—including CPU utilization and status, memory utilization, disk I/O requests and capacity, as well as network requests and utilization.

The VirtualWisdom ProbeVM family supports VMware vSphere®, IBM PowerVM®, and Microsoft Hyper-V® environments, presenting hundreds of performance and utilization metrics from across the virtual estate.

Metrics are persisted and correlated with data from other VirtualWisdom probes and infrastructure data to build a complete picture of the end-to-end system for each virtual machine or physical server.

Fibre Channel Network Family

VirtualWisdom uses SMI-S and SNMP to collect extensive metrics from Fibre Channel switching infrastructure—from director class to top of rack FCoE, embedded gateway or other FC standard switching devices. Additionally, VirtualWisdom directly integrates with the Cisco MDS 9700 32G SAN Telemetry Streaming capability.

Software Defined Storage Family

Understanding the performance of SDS and Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions is accomplished with deep integration into VMware’s vCenter and Dell EMC’s ScaleIO architectures.

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Virtual Machines

Network

Hyper Converged

SAN Fabric

Servers

Storage

Uncompromising visibility is gained with application to LUN SDS visibility coupled with network traffic flows via our ProbeNetFlow integrations. This lock-step integration technique provides complete SDS correlation, health and performance insights.

Application Discovery

Auto-discover and visualize key application services using standard interfaces, including ServiceNow CMDB integration, NetFlow analysis, host integration using SSH or WMI, and a shared context / topology with AppDynamics. Robust flexibility allows infrastructure owners to use one or more of these application discovery integrations to support specific customer environments.

ServiceNow

Adding to VirtualWisdom’s ITSM ticketing integration, the new ServiceNow® CMDB provides a single system of record for IT. VirtualWisdom, paired with the ServiceNow Service Mapping, allows you to gain full visibility of your infrastructure and the application services running on that infrastructure, leading to more control of your environment and better decisions.

NetFlow

Accessing NetFlow flow records allows VirtualWisdom to obtain data related to bandwidth utilization and to discover and optimize application performance. Tightly monitored routers and vSphere distributed switches (vDS) are mapped into the VirtualWisdom appliance through policy-based configuration options. ProbeNetFlow supports IP network visibility through NetFlow, jFlow, IPFIX, and SFlow integrations.

NetApp Family

VirtualWisdom NTAP Storage Probes help provide additional visibility into how the FAS storage array impacts the end-to-end system performance. ProbeNTAP is an API-based NAS storage software probe that collects and correlates health and utilization data from the underlying NAS arrays (NetApp ONTAP8 and 9 Clustered Systems).

SAN and NAS Performance Probes

Our family of hardware-based SAN and NAS Performance Probes are the most advanced, high capacity line-rate data inspection and analysis devices available. They inspect, process and analyze every frame and packet header in real-time. They capture the true, unaltered, I/O profile of the actual

application traffic, detecting application performance slowdowns and transmission errors by measuring every I/O transaction from start to finish.

The SAN Performance Probe family consists of a high-density (8Gb) 48-port edition, and (16Gb) 12 and 24-port models. The ProbeNAS is a (10Gb) 16-port device and supports both NFSv3 and SMB v2/v3 protocols. This product family delivers the full range of cost and density options customers require.

TAP Patch Panel System

Traffic Access Points (TAPs) provide a passive, failsafe

access point to Fibre Channel network traffic on

the TAPped link. This makes the light available for

real- time performance monitoring, deep problem

diagnosis and protocol layer analysis. TAPs are

non-powered, non-mechanical devices that reflect

a small portion of the signal through the TAP to

another port, which provides a copy of the light

to upstream, out of band probes. The passive TAP

does not introduce any latency or overhead, has no

impact on application or SAN/NAS performance,

and is integrated with several industry leading

Patch Panel Systems for simple deployment.

TAP Patch Panel System

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ProbeFC8-HD48

ProbeFC-16G-12

ProbeFC-16G-24

ProbeNAS-10G-16

VirtualServerProbe

VirtualWisdom Platform Appliance

Traditional Servers & VMs

ProbeNetFlow(Ethernet Switches)

ProbeSW(FC Switches)

Integrated Host

VirtualWisdom Overview

Application Servers

ProbeSDS for ScaleIO VirtualWisdom

Platform Appliance 4220

PWR

SYS

LOC

USE

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SWCH2

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SWCH2

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L22L46

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L24L48

VSAN Cluster

ProbeSDS

Cisco MDS 9700

for VSAN

FC Storage ArraysNAS Storage Arrays

TAP PatchPanels

NAS or SANPerformance Probes

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RADIATION

LIVE

TAPALLOUT

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VirtualWisdom Platform ArchitectureThe VirtualWisdom Platform is composed of a

fully integrated combination of VirtualWisdom

software and hardware probes and the purpose-

built VirtualWisdom Platform Appliance. This

powerful combination of hardware and software,

all fully developed, integrated, and tested in-house

at Virtual Instruments, ensures the highest levels

of performance, scalability, and serviceability.

VirtualWisdom’s unique combination of software and

hardware probes persists, correlates and analyzes

an unparalleled breadth and depth of data, including

wire data collected from throughout the end-to-end

infrastructure. This highly accurate and comprehensive

solution enables customers to start managing

performance, stop reactive troubleshooting, and

achieve cost optimization across their infrastructure.

How Virtual Instruments is Unique

1) Full stack, application-centric view of your infrastructure. We help you to understand physical

& virtual infrastructure interrelationships, to map

applications to the underlying shared infrastructure

across servers/VMs, networks and storage.

2) Highly granular, heterogenous, agentless monitoring. You can non-intrusively track

every transaction and I/O request to see

how application behavior and infrastructure

changes affect response times.

3) Massive ingest capability of both machine and wire data. We uniquely capture continuous, real-time

wire and machine data metrics via comprehensive

instrumentation across all infrastructure elements

with unsurpassed data ingest capabilities.

4) Cross-silo correlation and machine-learning-based analytics. VirtualWisdom App-centric Analytics

correlate and analyze wire and machine data in the

context of the application to help you proactively

find and resolve performance problems and optimize

utilization without your users even knowing.

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With VirtualWisdom Intuitive Persona-driven Dashboards multi-team collaboration becomes a reality to fine-tune system-wide performance.

VirtualWisdom Responsive User Interface

The intuitive VirtualWisdom graphical user interface

broadens the value of the VirtualWisdom solution

to the entire organization. Customized views

designed for IT engineering, IT operations, IT

executives, application owners, and business unit

managers make it easy to understand the health,

performance and utilization of the infrastructure

that supports the key business applications.

VirtualWisdom users can effectively perform

comprehensive analysis, collaborate across silos,

and make informed decisions based on definitive

insights about how applications and infrastructure

are performing. The dynamic user interface enables

multiple teams to quickly and confidently answer

questions—and deliver the right information at

the right time. This means regardless of function

(application, server, storage, virtualization, etc.),

you can collaboratively resolve problems and fine-

tune infrastructure performance based on business,

application, workload and SLA requirements.

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Solutions: Problems that Virtual Instruments Solves

How to Implement, Measure, and Report on Performance Based SLAs

In today’s highly virtualized and cloud-based environments, delivering highly responsive applications and data is about more than just availability—it’s about guaranteeing performance. What is even more important, is to be able to definitively measure and report on the specific performance being delivered, based on the application, line of business or tier of service. The visibility required to develop and deliver performance-based SLAs cannot be provided by individual device-specific data or polling-based “averages of averages”—it must be based on a comprehensive view of the end-to-end system and granular measurement of actual infrastructure response times. VirtualWisdom is the only App-centric IPM platform that provides precise data on system-wide performance by measuring every transaction, in real time, on the wire. This enables you to establish accurate baselines and measure changes over time, based on the actual workload and associated response times. With VirtualWisdom you can confidently deliver and report on SLA performance, providing visibility and accountability at all levels of the organization.

The VirtualWisdom dynamic GUI enables each cross-functional team to collaborate and customize their views of infrastructure health, performance and utilization.

VirtualWisdom is the only IPM platform that helps you proactively identify and resolve issues with app-centric analytics before they impact performance and availability.

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Move from Reactive Troubleshooting to Proactive Problem Avoidance

Regardless of how well architected and implemented

today’s physical, virtual and cloud-based

infrastructures are, it is inevitable that at some point

you will have to react to performance or availability

issues that catch you off-guard and are challenging to

identify and resolve. This ‘after the fact’ approach to

troubleshooting usually requires the involvement of

multiple teams, many with different sets of data and

information. In most cases, root cause is inferred or

never definitively proven. VirtualWisdom is the only

App-centric IPM platform that helps you proactively

identify and resolve issues before they impact

performance and availability. The unparalleled

breadth and depth of system-wide metrics, combined

with the power of entity and application-centric

reporting, alerting and analytics, enables you to

absolutely know the answer—before there is an

impact, before you get a call from the application

user. Don’t guess, know—and avoid the problem

before it keeps you and your team up all night!

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VirtualWisdom enables you to visualize key infrastructure metrics in the context of the applications that it supports.

VirtualWisdom ServicesVirtual Instruments offers a variety of services

that help customers augment their existing

IT staff with highly trained infrastructure

performance management specialists.

Deployment Options

Silver, Gold, Platinum

Our deployment options provide VI

Professional Services expertise for maximum

productivity and fastest time-to-value.

Our Silver option provides VI experts to

configure your solution, ensure data collection,

and train your staff in basic product use.

Our Gold deployment includes all of the services

provided in our Silver deployment, plus help to set up

your solution to proactively manage your infrastructure.

Our Platinum deployment includes our most

comprehensive installation, configuration, and

training package. We install and configure your

solution, then perform a baseline assessment

and provide 3 months of follow up assistance.

Infrastructure Performance Assessment (IPA)

The IPA service includes delivery of best practices,

baseline reporting, advanced analysis and alert

investigation. In many cases, this service is delivered

in direct support of large scale migration and

consolidation projects. This service can be delivered as

a stand-alone solution that is inclusive of a dedicated,

targeted deployment of the VirtualWisdom Platform,

or as auxiliary services in a currently installed account.

Virtual Instruments Managed Service (VIMS)

Managed Services deliver monthly health,

utilization and performance reports, track progress

against key KPIs and help customers proactively

manage their VirtualWisdom environments.

They are focused on improving the performance

and availability of customers’ mission-critical

applications by augmenting their existing staff.

Storage Performance Validation and Testing

The Storage Performance Validation and Testing

Service delivers a custom report detailing and

comparing the performance of different storage

systems and configurations, to enable more

intelligent purchase and deployment decisions.

How VirtualWisdom Complements Your Current Management SolutionsToday’s most common management solutions—such as

Enterprise Management Frameworks, Storage Resource

Managers, Virtual Server Monitors, Application

Performance Monitors, and SAN Fabric Managers—all

lack continuous real-time monitoring of application

workload across the end-to-end infrastructure. These

legacy management products typically poll devices

and average the metrics over 5 to 20-minute periods,

which render them incapable of managing performance

and insufficient for identifying and resolving problems.

The VirtualWisdom platform is the only solution

that can non-intrusively optimize the performance

and availability of applications by measuring and

correlating actual workload I/O profile data from the

VM, Physical Server, Switch Fabric and Storage.

The VirtualWisdom platform enhances your

current management solutions with:

• A comprehensive view of the entire open

systems stack to find problems undetectable

by software- only monitoring

• Highly accurate and detailed continuous real-time,

unbiased monitoring—for definitive insights

• Deterministic pinpointing of root

causes and impacts on infrastructure

and application performance

• Trending and analysis for proactively identifying

emergent issues before they impact performance

• Performance trending to identify hardware

degradation, to enable preemptive

component replacement before failure

• Storage network statistics such as pending

exchanges, to tune queue depths for

maximum application performance

• The ability to determine if configuration changes

are affecting application and infrastructure

performance by examining systemic latency

• Heterogeneous support of all devices, including

storage switches, arrays, Software Defined,

HCI, and NAS and Fibre Channel component

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Training [email protected]

Website virtualinstruments.com

Sales [email protected] 1.888.522.2557

© 03/2018 Virtual Instruments. All rights reserved. Features and specifications are subject to change without notice. VirtualWisdom®, Virtual Instruments®, SANInsight®, Virtual Instruments Certified Associate, Virtual Instruments Certified Professional, and Virtual Instruments University are trademarks or registered trademarks in the United States and/or in other countries. All other trademarks and trade names are the property of their respective holders